Charlemont, and at first by George Steevens, who presented him with his collection of old plays, and at one time professed to have retired from Shakespearean investigation in Malone's favour. Malone began work on the chronological arrangement of Shakespeare's plays, and in January 1778 published his ‘Attempt to ascertain the Order in which the Plays of Shakespeare were written.’ His results have not been very materially altered by later investigation. There followed in 1780 his very substantial supplement to Johnson's edition of Shakespeare in two volumes. The first contained ‘Supplemental Observations’ on the history of the Elizabethan stage and the text of the plays, with reprints of Arthur Brooke's ‘Romeus and Juliet,’ and Shakespeare's poems. The second volume supplied a reprint of ‘Pericles,’ and of five plays (‘Locrine,’ ‘Oldcastle,’ pt. i., ‘Cromwell,’ ‘London Prodigal,’ and ‘Puritan’) doubtfully assigned to Shakespeare. Malone followed Farmer in assigning the greater part of ‘Pericles’ to Shakespeare, and this view has been adopted by all later editors. In the spring of 1783 came out ‘A Second Appendix to Mr. Malone's Supplement to the last edition of the Plays of Shakespeare,’ i.e. to ‘Mr. Steevens's last excellent edition of 1778.’ This mainly consisted of textual emendation.
In August 1783 Malone asked Nichols, the editor of the ‘Gentleman's Magazine,’ to announce a new edition by himself ‘with select notes from all the commentators.’ To this work Malone devoted the next seven years. A breach with Steevens ensued. Malone had contributed a few notes, in which he differed from Steevens, to Isaac Reed's edition of 1783. Steevens demanded that Malone should transfer them unaltered to his projected edition, and when Malone declined to give the promise, Steevens took offence and the friendly intercourse ended. Malone issued in 1787 ‘A Dissertation on the Three Parts of King Henry VI, tending to show that those Plays were not originally written by Shakespeare.’ But his researches were largely directed to elucidating the biography of Shakespeare and the history of the Elizabethan stage. Francis Ingram of Ribbesford lent Malone the valuable office-book (now lost) of Sir Henry Herbert [q. v.], and the master of Dulwich College allowed him to remove to his own house the Alleyn and Henslowe MSS., while he examined the records in the court of chancery and in the registry of the Worcester diocese. In April 1788 he began a correspondence with James Davenport, vicar of Stratford-on-Avon, who lent him the parish registers. Malone also visited Stratford and made the acquaintance of John Jordan [q. v.], the poet of the town, who interested himself in antiquities, and was not incapable of inventing them. Malone entertained Jordan when he visited London in July 1799, and tried to obtain some government place for him. With Davenport he corresponded till 1805, and his correspondence with both him and Jordan was published in very limited editions, from manuscripts preserved at Stratford, in 1864, by Mr. J. O. Halliwell. Malone did Stratford an ill turn when he induced the vicar in 1793 to whitewash the coloured bust of Shakespeare in the chancel of the church. The incident suggested the bitter epigram—
Stranger, to whom this monument is shewn,
Invoke the poet's curse upon Malone;
Whose meddling zeal his barbarous taste betrays,
And daubs his tombstone, as he mars his plays.
(Gent. Mag. 1815, pt. i. p. 390.)
The main results of Malone's investigations were published in November 1790 in his edition of ‘Shakespeare,’ which appeared in ten volumes (but the first volume being in two parts, the whole numbered eleven). Among those who eulogised Malone's efforts was Burke, who acknowledged his infinite pains, great sagacity, and public-spirited labour, and lamented that he could only repay Malone's gift of gold with a gift of brass in the form of ‘The Reflections on the French Revolution.’ Reynolds would gladly have seen ‘more disquisition;’ Daines Barrington was ‘exceedingly gratified.’ Walpole, on the other hand, called it ‘the heaviest of all books … with notes that are an extract of all the opium that is spread through the works of all the bad playwrights of that age,’ but Walpole admitted that Malone's researches were ‘indefatigable’ (Letters, ix. 326). Malone's work found, indeed, detractors more outspoken than Walpole. James Hurdis, in his ‘Cursory Remarks upon the Arrangement of the Plays of Shakespeare,’ characterised Malone's labours as ‘disappointing.’ Joseph Ritson charged him with a ‘total want of ear and judgment’ in a pamphlet entitled ‘Cursory Criticisms,’ 1792. ‘His pages abound’ (according to Ritson) ‘with profound ignorance, idle conjectures, crude notions, feeble attempts at jocularity,’ and the like. Malone replied in April in ‘A Letter to the Rev. Richard Farmer, D.D.,’ of which the presentation copy to Farmer is in the British Museum. Malone there showed that after carefully collating the hundred thousand lines of the text he had made 1,654 emendations. Ritson alleged only thirteen errors, and in five he was mistaken. Steevens, when reissuing his edition
